


Turn of the Tide

by AMarguerite



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Canon Continuation, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Painkillers, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-08
Updated: 2016-03-08
Packaged: 2018-05-25 11:15:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6192877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AMarguerite/pseuds/AMarguerite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ralph finds it difficult to keep on at the MI5 after Burgess and Maclean defect to the USSR. Laurie finds it difficult to reconcile talk of queer spy rings and campaigns against vice with his rather conventional domesticity. Everyone finds it difficult to understand Alec's taste in men.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Turn of the Tide

**Author's Note:**

  * For [looselipssinksubs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/looselipssinksubs/gifts).



The tight, painful cramp in his knee was an implacable enemy. It pursued him even in dreams. Laurie was forced to confront it after several fitful snatches of sleep were disturbed by the old nightmare, of having to drag himself around the beaches of Dunkirk with the bone was sticking out of his leg, while he was somehow in charge of the retreat. He sat up, strangely out of breath, and felt instinctively but muddle-headedly through the bedclothes. On damp evenings like this, Ralph generally inserted a hot water bottle under Laurie’s knee when coming to bed, which cowed the cramp into a temporary retreat. But a glance at the alarm clock showed it wasn’t even eleven yet; Ralph hadn’t even finished his last drink of the evening. 

It sometimes occurred to Laurie that Ralph had never gone a day without a drink, since Dunkirk. It seemed dishonest to posture or take a moral tone about it, however, when Laurie hadn't gone a day without APC or painkillers for the same stretch of time. Laurie felt on the night table for the bottle of aspirin he usually kept there and found it empty. There was only a tract the boy friend of Laurie’s work friend Algie had sent them, and which Laurie had taken care to stick in the pocket of his dressing gown before Ralph saw it.

Let Algie Hawkes’s analyst boy friend think what he likes, thought Laurie, tetchy. Algie Hawkes and whatever-his-name was been doing propaganda work for the Ministry the whole war. They hadn't been injured in the line of duty. They didn't understand how necessary it was to hobble on with a crutch when the alternative was to fall over and to fall to pieces without it. 

Laurie tried to massage his knee himself, but gave it up as a bad job and swung himself out of bed and into his dressing gown instead. (He took care to hide the tract with its helpful offer of twelve steps at the bottom of the waste basket first). The stairs down to the main floor of the cottage had gotten easier with the addition of the rails on either side (Ralph had put them in when Laurie had, in a fit of pain-induced irritation, condemned to hell the original architects and their ideas of what stairs should be), but it felt like his knee had been replaced with a hot poker by the time he had gotten down them. 

It was not as painful as it had been at its worst: at Dunkirk, in hospital, and when he'd twisted it and kept running during his second firewatch at the Victoria and Albert Museum when the roof of the Cast Courts had caught fire and ironically destroyed two German effigies. He thought briefly of finding his prefered cane-- a gold-knobbed one Alec had thoughtfully had made for him as a thirtieth birthday present-- but had automatically hobbled into the sitting room before he could consciously decide. 

Ralph was before the fire, looking thinner and bleaker than usual, with his head tilted back against the back of the couch. He was pinching the bridge of his nose with his left thumb and forefinger, as if to stave off a headache. He heard Laurie’s step, still distressingly distinctive as it was, and immediately snapped to attention.

“Hullo,” said Laurie. “Couldn’t sleep, so I thought I’d join you.”  

“How's the knee, Spud?” Ralph asked, quickly putting his concerns, the way he compulsively whisked away dirty clothing. “Rotten?”

“As the state of Denmark.” Over the years, Laurie had learnt that in order to give Ralph the comfort he would never allow himself to ask for, Laurie would sometimes have to take on a pose of exaggerated weakness. Laurie never considered this lying, or even to belong to the realm of falsehoods- there was an underlying truth to the request of touch and reassurance, and it had gotten muddled in his head with lines about one body and one flesh from church services. And, at any rate, he'd grown out of the wish not to have his leg noticed or fussed over. It pained him so consistently and he’d had to use crutch or stick so nearly from the start of his working life, it seemed foolish to pretend he still had a working kneecap.

“Did we walk too far today?”

“It's only that it's a damp evening,” said Laurie. “Makes it worse than usual. You aren't too busy right now, are you?”

“Never too busy for you, Spuddy. Come sit by the fire. I'll get you some of those tablets of Alec’s and be with you directly.” Ralph tossed back the rest of his drink and walked briskly out, taking the empty glass with him.

Laurie lowered himself onto the couch and closed his eyes, in a vague attempt to lure his body back to sleep. It didn’t much work; he was too aware of Ralph’s absence.

Even after they’d passed from honeymooning into the state of protracted annoyances and deeper contentments called cohabitation, Ralph remained a spectacularly physical presence. Laurie had a vague theory that this concentration of self was because there was seldom any proof of Ralph’s having been in a room: his desk was kept compulsively tidy, his papers and journals always had a yale on when they weren’t being examined, drink glasses remained in Ralph’s hand when they weren’t being cleaned or in the cupboard. Ralph had once forgotten to empty an ashtray before bed, because Laurie had distracted him, and the next morning glared at it as if charging it with a disciplinary offense.  

There was a creak of floorboards and door, then the couch gave a faint ‘wumpf’ of protest. It was romanticism of the most quotidian to think he could feel Ralph’s warmth, but Laurie indulged himself. He was feeling poorly, he reasoned. He couldn't be blamed for it.

“Alright, take this. There. Let’s see the knee, then.”

Laurie eased his leg onto Ralph’s lap, and rested the side of his head on the top of the couch. “Thanks, Ralph.“

“Of course, Spuddy.” 

Ralph had never lost that air of a country bone-setter when he went to work on Laurie’s knee. There was a kindly comfort in the touch that eased an ache deeper than sore muscles. Even five minutes of this (plus the tablets Laurie tried not to use every evening, for fear of becoming as dependent on them as he was on APC), eased Laurie into a state of relaxation that was not precisely loose-limbed, but close to it.

“All right, Ralph?” Laurie asked, sleepily. “You seemed to have the headache when I came in. Dinner with my mother and Mr. Straike wasn't so bad, was it? I thought his cold made him less awful than usual.”

“Work,” said Ralph. Then, perhaps fearing he had been short with Laurie, he said, “I'd tell you, but then I'd have to kill you, and I don't think the dog would ever forgive me for  _ that. _ ”

“Never,” agreed Laurie, content in the knowledge that the dog liked him best. “Anything I can do for you, Ralph? You're not out of writing paper or anything, are you?” Ralph still instinctively turned to pen and paper when he couldn't speak of what was troubling him, though he'd since had the sense to pretend his journals were notes for novels, and to give the people mentioned in them different names and misleadingly different physical features. “There should be extra in the cupboard if your notebook’s full.”

“No, nothing like that. Just stay here and keep me company. The dog won't be roused from his basket.”

“Lowering thought, being interchangeable with a dog-- even if it is our Childe Maurice.”

“You are in every way an improvement from an Airedale constantly coated in burrs, and bewildered by every rabbit it manages to catch.” 

“I’m too well accustomed to rationing to be bewildered by rabbits,” Laurie said drowsily. He was feeling tender and amused by Ralph’s habit of referring to their dog as only ‘the dog,’ when Ralph, more often than not, was the one cosseting it. “Childe Maurice is from a more privileged epoch. He hunts for sport, not to pad out the meat coupons.”

Abruptly, Ralph said, “We are entirely domesticated, aren't we? Not in the least what people usually fear or think. Nothing but dinner or drinks during the week, with company no more scandalous than a handful of queer doctors and museum workers, and weekends in the countryside with the dog, when there aren’t those classical music concerts of yours.”

“I never was one for--”

“Yes, I know how you feel about queer parties.”

“You're not going to convince me you enjoy the grand dos of the Belgravia queens,” said Laurie, opening his eyes. “I go with you often enough to parties with queers in attendance, don't I?” It was a subtle but rather meaningful distinction to Laurie.

“It's not that.”

Laurie kept his eyes half-open. He liked to look at Ralph in profile; that hadn't much changed since they were in school together. The incipient lines had become graven, the blue eyes more inclined to squint, but that was all. Laurie had resigned himself to paunch, what with a museum desk job and his knee, but Ralph had not and was still spare, and alert-looking. He would probably remain so until he was eighty. Ralph's hands stilled on Laurie’s knee.

“My dear,” he said, staring at the fireplace, “I meant to sound grateful. There's some... look, Spuddy, if I tell you this, no one can know.”

“I can keep a secret,” said Laurie, sitting up and feeling offended. “My mother still thinks I'm in mourning over Nurse Adrian.”

After returning to Oxford, he had written rather dull notes about Plato and the effect of the war on the university buildings to Nurse Adrian, more out of guilt that he had used her to prove something to himself than a desire to renew the acquaintance. She had eagerly written back, and written so frequently Laurie’s mother began to save up her clothing coupons in case Nurse Adrian needed something new and possibly white. Fortunately or unfortunately (and Laurie was never sure which), the EMS hospital had been hit, and the next time Laurie had seen Nurse Adrian had been at her funeral. It had been horrible in every way. He had been illogically convinced he had caused her death, simply by wishing hard enough that there was a way to get out of the correspondence. In an ill-thought out penance, Laurie committed himself to the idea that he would have proposed as soon as he had graduated and found a job, Ralph and his own nature be damned. It was a thoroughly stupid thing to do, particularly since he knew he had only committed to it because there was no chance of it ever coming true.  _ Pater  _ and  _ mater  _ Adrian had been so happy with this story Laurie had felt like the worst sort of confidence man. When they told him how much their daughter had loved him, and how much they would have liked to have him as a son-in-law, Laurie had wept in public, for the first time since he had been a child. It was out of guilt rather than straight grief, but his mother had been as consoling as he’d wished she’d been when he was recovering from his surgeries, and even Mr. Straike had said, in what was meant to be a kindly tone, “Stop apologizing, Laurence. We all would have thought the worse of you if you hadn't given free rein to your grief, given the circumstances. Tears are the last gift you can give her. No one begrudges you this, I assure you.”

The Adrians had been particularly gratified to see him so overset, and remained so with every year Mrs. Straike sent them a Christmas card saying Laurie was still unmarried.

Ralph, of course, had been so insufferably forbearing and yet so cynically pragmatic about the whole tawdry mess they had quarreled, and kept quarreling through letters after Ralph’s shore leave had ended. 

It had strangely worked out, in the end, for neither of them could bear the thought of a final break, and the distance allowed them the leisure to sort out their own problems without the interference of the other. Ralph, away at sea, could not meddle and had been forced to accept it. Laurie, for the first time trying to find a job and live on his own, realized how horribly right Ralph had been on far too many points, and how much of his interference arose from painful experience, and the driving need to keep Laurie from the same. Ralph’s next shore leave had been made much easier by the fact that Laurie had taken a job at the V and A and was so secure in the purpose, friendships, and lifestyle that came with it, Ralph had to acknowledge Laurie was fully capable of running his own life; and by the fact that Ralph’s own, compulsive need to be needed was mitigated by subsequent promotions in the RNVR and, later, in how eagerly the Admiralty had wooed him away from the sea to Bletchley Park.

Even now the mention of Nurse Adrian made Ralph fall silent and look contemplative. “Well,” he said eventually, “there’s that. You're safe in more ways than one, Spud. Heard of Guy Burgess at all?”

“Heard of, haven't met,” said Laurie. “I know more of his ex, Pollock. Algie Hawkes keeps hinting we should go to Tangiers, next time we go on holiday, as we'd get along.”

“Like hell we’re ever going to Tangiers,” said Ralph, acidically. “It’s Burgess and his set who’s gotten all the rest of us into this mess to begin with. What galls me particularly is that had I actually gone to Cambridge, they would have been  _ my _ set. As it is, Burgess is still a fellow I know somewhat intimately from that awkward period after I was expelled from school and disowned by my parents, but hadn't yet managed to get to sea. I would have avoided him if I could have, since even then he was drunk to the point of constant indiscretion, but not everyone's keen on renting a boy with a public school accent. Burgess was damned indiscriminate. He'd take anyone between seventeen and seventy, as long as he could pay them and cross-examine them on how badly off they were with the Depression on.”

Laurie did not know what to say to this. He had guessed at what Ralph had done after leaving school but they had never spoken so explicitly about it before. Ralph was too lost in his own thoughts to pay much attention to Laurie’s ambivalent confusion.

“I’d’ve been damned any way this could have shaken out. What a bloody mess.”

“What mess?”

“Burgess and Maclean-- who you wouldn't know, Spuddy, he’s got leanings, but he’s also got a wife and nearly three children, and everyone ‘round MI5 knew something was wrong with him, the way he looked and drank. They've disappeared. My skipper thinks Maclean's  favorite drunken joke was right. Burgess and Maclean were Communist spies.”

Laurie thought he had misheard. “Sorry?”

Ralph repeated himself, in a flat, emotionless voice. “Two British diplomats have fled to the Lord knows where, and the working theory is that they're both Soviet spies. It'll be in the papers soon. And the worst of it is, Spuddy, that when I left the office today everyone was working in an addendum- that there’s a queer spy ring.”

“ _ What?” _

“If there is, I suppose I'm too domestic-minded to have been recruited,” said Ralph, dryly. “For this relief, Spud, much thanks.”

Aside from the obvious, Laurie had always been conventional, in the most stolidly British middle class tradition. Queer Soviet spy rings seemed to him something out of the films he didn't like at the cinema (not that he really liked many films; he was rather snobbish about live theatre being in every way superior). “They can't honestly think that.”

“They can and do,” said Ralph. “The papers will devote weeks, if not months to it all. Well, perhaps not the rumored queer Commie spy ring-- yet-- but Burgess and Maclean’s flight, certainly. D’you know what the Americans are already saying? Burgess and Maclean were drunks and sexual deviants who ought never to have been given posts.”

Laurie heard the implicit self-condemnation of Ralph’s statements and knew that if he said anything, Ralph would double down and made the implicit explicit, but sought to argue against it with a demonstration of quiet tenderness. It did not long distract Ralph, but it served to lessen the force of the blow.  

“Ha,” said Ralph, bleakly, stroking the nape of Laurie’s neck with the side of his left forefinger. “At least the Foreign Office called it an extremely unfriendly and damaging statement.” 

Over the years general ideals and principles tended to fall by the wayside if not particularly linked to someone or some situation Laurie knew, but this was not so with Ralph. He would have been a Stoic in Ancient Greece, or Thomas More in Henry VIII’s court. Had he been captured by the Nazis, he would have tunneled out of a camp, or else been shot with his last words as “God save the king!” Laurie tried to take this into account but the personal was always foremost in his mind. “It won't-- there won't be any blowback for you, will there?”

“If they're going forward with this Friday’s most popular theory and routing queers from all branches of government service, certainly.”

Laurie felt himself going white. “Did Burgess--”

“Don't worry, Spud. Even at nineteen I wasn't stupid enough to give Burgess my real name or the actual name of my school. I'm not in danger.” He gave a mirthless laugh. “ _ Immediate  _ danger.”

“If it... if I....”

“For a man with no degree, I’ve gone remarkably far in the MI5,” said Ralph, wryly. “It isn’t you, Spuddy. It’s the reason  _ why _ I never read Geography at Cambridge.”

Laurie didn't know what to say to that. He shifted closer, so that he was leaning his head on Ralph’s shoulder instead of the couch.

“I'm sorry for getting you into this, Spud.”

“Me? I'm not MI5. The most confidential documents I've ever seen are notes from the National Trust on where the V and A’s tapestries went in ‘39. What can they do to me?”

“Well for one thing, Spud,” said Ralph, lightly, “if they start digging around in my personal life, and find out we aren't precisely roommates, things may become damned unpleasant for you.”

Laurie hadn’t thought of that, but, then again, he’d always been good at compartmentalizing. That was half of why he’d so taken to the sort of registrar work he had first done with the collections. He liked putting things into their proper places, and then not having to think about them until he needed to go back to them. He hadn’t ever before thought of contingency plans, but he felt he ought to have done and feigned confidence. “It’s not like there aren’t museums in Paris. I’ve gotten rather good at the transport of awkward artifacts back from the tube stations and country houses where they were lodged, and tracing where they might have gone if they aren’t there. I expect there’s call for that sort of thing all over Europe, at present.” 

“Oh  _ Spuddy _ ,” said Ralph, with exhaustion and fondness mingled. “You are too bloody good to be true.”

“You forget you're going to have to carry all the trunks,” said Laurie, with a pointed look at his knee. 

Ralph’s smile was tired but his kiss was promisingly energetic. Before Laurie could act on this, Ralph broke away and said, “Don't worry Spuddy. It's more likely that if things come to pass the way I think they will, they'll just ferret us out and fire us, on the off chance all our coded language has more to do with the USSR than sex. They wouldn't want us all fleeing to the continent. They'd want to keep an eye on us in England. You don't have to worry. I know you like it at the V and A.”

“Yes, but I like you more. I’d choose you over the job, any day.”

Ralph laid his good hand on Laurie’s leg, with as much tenderness as that first kiss in the prefect’s study. “Let's hope they'll be sensible then. Could you stay on at the V and A, even if it got out your, ah, roommate was dismissed from MI5 after all the queers were routed?”

“It’s not like I’d be badly treated if it did come out,” said Laurie. “If one took all the old maids and confirmed bachelors out of museums, everyplace would be worse staffed than they were during the Blitz.” Ralph didn't look entirely convinced, so Laurie added, “After the director’s secretary set me up on that horrible date with her niece last week, our keeper of the textiles took me to lunch and told me she prefers to live with a friend, too. And she’s been at the V and A since 1920.” He frowned. “Oh, I meant to tell you about that earlier. Miss Clayton wants to have us to dinner some evening next week.”

“Miss Halliburton again, isn't it?” asked Ralph, fondly. “These tweed-wearing women of a certain age do make a pet out of you, don't they, Spud?”

“You're one to talk,” said Laurie, though he kept his tone good-humored. 

Ralph offered him a smile that was honest in its exhaustion, if nothing else. “Ah, but you see, Spud, there's a difference. It's  _ Miss _ Clayton. No one ever thought to legislate against Sappho’s later sisters. The Victorians couldn't conceive of it. They did conceive of us, and created some fairly damning laws.”

“They wouldn't-- there’s no chance of our being arrested, is there?”

“Spuddy, there's always that chance.”

“You know what I mean,” said Laurie, trying to keep the irritation from his voice.

Ralph sighed. “For me, possibly. Depends. I was volunteering to defend England from ‘39 on. I can point to good work in the North Sea, at Dunkirk, in the Atlantic, and at Bletchley. That's something. They might give me a warning. They might fire me. They might arrest me. Honestly Spud, the only thing I can say with any certainty is that I won't let them arrest you.”

“If they arrest you, I don't entirely know how that can be avoided,” said Laurie. A horrible suspicion occurred to him. “Don't you dare think of moving out.”

He had been right. Ralph said, with a sort of bleak courage, “Spud-”

Pettish in a way he hadn't been since his twenties, Laurie said, “You wanted to move in together after the very first night we ever spent together.”

“Yes but--”

“Yes my--” and Laurie followed this up with one of the sailor’s oaths he’d picked up from Ralph. “In every possible way I've bought this. Chosen this. Whichever. If you go anywhere, I'm coming too.”

“Spud-”

“If you're not happy or don't love me any longer, fine, go. But I'll lay you out cold if you try to go and leave me behind out of some idiotic sense of self-sacrifice.”

Ralph seized on what seemed to Laurie a throwaway line. “Could you lay me out cold? I'm taller than you are, Spuddy. And there's the leg.”

“I could jolly well try!” Though he had used a phrase much cruder than ‘jolly well.’ “My section of fourteen privates and I were left behind when top brass gave the order to the rest of the army to retreat to Dunkirk. We held out fine.” Honesty compelled him to add, unwillingly: “Until the Luftwaffe dropped a bomb on us and my leg took the brunt of it. But the point remains. I know how to fight.”

“You always do fight fiercest for lost causes. Spud takes down the shillelagh.”

Laurie realized that Ralph was very, very tired, and had been hiding it throughout their drive from London, their dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Straike, their evening walk, and their earlier cose by the fire. He gentled his tone and said, “Ralph, don't worry about me.”

“It's too ingrained a habit, Spuddy.”

Laurie, seeking to distract him, shifted to press once again to Ralph’s side. “It's early days yet. Look, there's a labor shortage in museums. That's half of why I was hired in the first place- well that and the leg making it so that I couldn't possibly be called up again or reassigned to Ministry work like the rest of the staff- I can make out anywhere you choose to go. And I can't believe they wouldn't at least give you a warning before they would try anything.” This did a certain amount of good; more definitive was the almost violent display of love that then followed.

Laurie himself became worried on Monday, when all the talk at tea was not the latest exhibition, or the ongoing but rather confused attempts at staff reorganization, but the missing diplomats. He was appealed to only to echo the general surprise; most people did not know Laurie lived with an MI5 agent. Generally any getting-to-know-your-coworkers spiel on him began on, “Mr. Odell may mostly work with the free classical music concerts these days, but he knows where nearly every collection item is, you just need to give him a minute to walk through the exhibition halls to where it should be, or around the file room to jog his memory,” was followed up with, “He had his kneecap blown off at Dunkirk,” occasionally continued on to, “He badly strained it again when we caught on fire during the Blitz, and then got flooded from the firehoses,” and generally ended with, “Oh no! He's not married. He fell in love with a nurse at the hospital where he had all his surgeries, after Dunkirk. He wanted to finish at Oxford or get settled here or something before proposing, but her hospital was bombed before he had the chance. Poor lamb, I don't know if he’ll ever get over it. He's the type that wouldn't. Idealistic, you know.”

Algie, who was assistant keeper of photographs, as well as an amateur photographer himself, was most fascinated by the idea that idea that Burgess and Maclean might have been photographing state secrets, and kept glancing askance at Laurie, as if for corroboration. Laurie kept his expression blandly neutral. He fancied no one could tell he was worried, though later on Miss Clayton asked him to dinner Wednesday a little too heartily, and murmured, “Chin up, dearie. From what you’ve told me, your friend’s a heart-of-oak type and not likely to be involved.”

Home was not much better. Their two bedroom, ground floor flat was in uncharacteristic confusion. Ralph was ensconced behind the shared desk in the sitting room, flipping through his old diaries with the sort of bleary concentration he had when bloody drunk. His attempt at dinner was boiling over in the little kitchen. Childe Maurice was whining at the door, pawing at the lead still hanging on its hook, and the phone was ringing. Laurie reached for the bottle of APC in the drawer of the hall table. 

“Sorry Spud, mind handling that?” called Ralph.

Laurie dry-swallowed the pills, gave Childe Maurice a scratch behind the ears, and turned off the gas in the kitchen, before giving into the shrill demands of the phone. “Hallo?”

“What ho, Spud?” came the voice of Biffy.

“Hello Biffy,” Laurie replied, feeling marginally less annoyed. Alec’s taste in men had remained thoroughly inexplicable over the years, but Laurie rather liked his latest, Biffy, a former RAF pilot turned solicitor. It helped that Laurie had slightly known Biffy from the war, when the RAF had taken over part of the V and A for lack of other space. 

“I, er, saw the papers. The _ pater  _ sent a wire from Hong Kong about it, full of invective about MI5. Said even his far outpost of MI6 was in an uproar. Couldn't imagine what it must be like in MI5 in London, but if the administration returned to the incompetence they showed at the beginning of the last war, the agents would once again take the brunt of it.” MI6 and MI5 never could quite agree if they liked each other that week or not. “How’s old Ralph?”

Laurie glanced at the bent fair head, the feverishly flipped pages. “About as expected.”

“Thought as much--how’sabout Alec and I swing round with sandwiches ‘round seven? I think I can be of some help.”

Laurie weighed this, reaching already for the dog lead. “Alright. If you've got some gin, we've enough bitters.”

“Hope that's literal and not a metaphor.”

“It's both. There’s still some cake from my mother that’ll do for pudding.”

“Top hole! See you at seven.”

Ralph was still brittle and distracted when Laurie came back with Childe Maurice. He agreed to dinner almost without hearing, and seemed to be making a list based on two or three diaries open on the desk. Laurie did not ask, but busied himself with the dog, and setting the table. Ralph eventually, absently came round adjusting everything, a habit which Laurie found annoying, but never enough to do more than stew in resentful silence about it when it happened. 

Abruptly, Ralph said, “Spuddy, it's bad. Maclean’s wife called the Foreign Office today, asking if they'd seen her husband, but Burgess’s valet-cum-lover knew  _ exactly  _ where Burgess had gone. I think I may have been right last Friday.”

Laurie didn't know how to answer, particularly since Friday and today were the only times Ralph had ever let him in on confidential information. He was out of proportion glad when a knock on the door kept him from having to do so. “That’ll be them.”

“Keeping the hoi poloi out of gin palaces, still?” Biffy asked jovially, when Laurie unlatched the door. Behind him, Alec was still taking things out of the car.

“We do our best,” said Laurie. ‘I thought you were getting sandwiches.”

“Had to pick up Alec from his mother’s,” said Biffy, taking a couple bags from Alec’s arms. “They should do a study some day, see what the missing link is between Jewish mothers and Chinese mothers. Mine won’t let me leave without two days worth of leftovers either.”

Laurie was still occasionally baffled by Alec’s parents, who were both devotees of Freud, and yet-- or perhaps because of it-- seemed rather keen to get to know the more lasting of Alec’s boy friends. Laurie knew of no other family who behaved in so extraordinary a fashion. Ralph hadn’t talked to his parents since he'd been expelled from school, and though Biffy’s parents probably knew, they pretended not to and made a point of never asking about his personal life. Algie’s mother still kept trying to set him up with the neighbor’s daughter and lamenting his fastidiousness. As far as Mr. and Mrs. Straike were concerned, Ralph and Laurie lived together because they had but one good set of legs and one good set of hands between them, and each needed the other-- practically, of course not  _ emotionally _ \-- to get through life. Laurie could never manage to find a way of driving that spared his knee, and Ralph, though very adept at doing with one and a half hands what most people needed to do with two, could only produce oaths and huge messes when trying to cook. Laurie had never asked his mother why she thought Ralph hadn’t married, but was under the impression she thought people who did hush-hush work for the government had to be a little like monks, and keep off marrying due to the rigors of the service.   

Alec and Biffy waited only for Ralph to drink his second pink gin to let fall the somewhat desultory conversation about Britten’s latest work and start in on Burgess and Maclean. Laurie was much relieved to discover that it was highly unlikely Burgess would have left behind anything to implicate Ralph, or as Biffy determined, holding onto the list, and flipping through one of Ralph’s old diaries, with Ralph hovering over his shoulder like the Angel of Death before the firstborn of Egypt, nothing that could get him called up on charges. “But from what you're telling me, old boy, MI5 might get rather hot soon. Or at least, blackmailers will think so, and be after you.”

“I'll destroy your letters,” said Alec. “I burned all the sensitive ones when you first went to Bletchley, but nothing wrong in being careful.”

“You'd better too,” said Ralph, to Laurie.

“Oh must I?” Laurie asked, feeling dismayed. He rather liked thumbing through the old letters the rare times Ralph was traveling for work.

“It could probably wait a week,” said Biffy. “Did you track down anyone who had a letter of yours when you were first getting your security clearances?”

“Most everyone.”

“Get that sorted first,” advised Biffy. “Then we’ll worry about Laurie here. But really, V and A staff member who helped save the building from burning down in the Blitz, started the Sunday concert series, injured at Dunkirk, only ever attended maybe two queer parties in his life, has a positive horror of the tackiness of queer bars? Safe as houses.”

“Have you come to praise or to bury me?” asked Laurie, not quite managing to hit the right tone. Laurie pushed the remains of his dinner around his plate. He wished Alec’s mother had not sent them the better part of a black market brisket. He had grown unused to so much meat at once and was beginning to feel sick.

Alec went to the sideboard to mix more drinks. “Ralph, perhaps you ought to think of getting out of MI5.”

“And do what?”

Laurie thought he ought to mention that his salary at the V and A had been designed for a man with a wife to keep and children to support, but given that Ralph had spent the early evening re-reading his diaries from the time he was rent, it seemed wiser to keep silent.

“Go back to sea?” Alec suggested, after tasting his own drink, and passing over a glass of tonic water to Biffy, who was driving. “Sit for a degree someplace and join the FRGS like you once planned? Go into radio? You had that hush-hush radio course, after all.”

“And I've seven-and-a-half fingers,” he said, dryly. 

“Fingers you lost at Dunkirk,” said Biffy, helpfully. “Come on, old boy, there's plenty of other things you could do, and plenty of places that give preference to veterans.”

“Spud, are you feeding the dog under the table?” Ralph asked, with an exasperated fondness,  in lieu of replying. 

Laurie gave a feeble protest, much undercut by the fact that Childe Maurice was still eagerly licking brisket pieces off his fingers, and the fact that Childe Maurice’s tail was most likely whapping Ralph’s left shin. Laurie kept on with it though, in the sudden, uncomfortable knowledge that Ralph didn't want any other job than the one he had. Ralph got to use all his technical and organizational powers on tricky and complex problems, and had a special talent for finding the proper solutions. It was the sort of work that not only gained him respect, but aided England. Ralph had based a great deal of his self-conceit, and his self-worth, on being an MI5 agent. 

It was unpleasant however one looked at it, thought Laurie. Why can't any of these grand institutions let Ralph be more than just a queer?

 

***

 

Laurie offered to call off the dinner with Miss Clayton and her girl friend, but Ralph said, distractedly, “I’d rather not have the chance to overthink things, Spuddy,” and so, armed with a bottle of the sherry Laurie knew Muriel Clayton to prefer, they ventured over to Bloomsbury. 

“You didn’t bring the Airedale?” asked Muriel, looking slightly disappointed as she shut the door behind him. 

“I brought Ralph,” said Laurie, “who’s much better company than Childe Maurice.”

And Ralph gave her the bottle of sherry, as well as the smile of practiced charm that had served him so well. “A pleasure to meet you, Miss Clayton. Spud here has been telling me about you for years.”

“Call me Muriel,” she said, holding out a hand to shake. “And her--” gesturing to a shorter, gray-haired woman behind her “--Eddie. Her people thought Edwina sounded smart.”

“Not their greatest sin against me, all told,” said Eddie, dryly. She was the sort of person who always seemed to be wearing tweeds, pearls, and fur stoles no matter how she dressed. She'd probably gotten into the work of editing mystery novels because she'd seen someone murdered in an uncle’s manor house, thought Laurie. She responded to ‘Eddie,’ mostly because Muriel had said she would, but determinedly called Laurie and Ralph, ‘Mr. Odell,’ and ‘Mr. Lanyon.’ Some people, she seemed to say, with her tightened lips and slight frowns at the back of Muriel’s head, were not made lackadaisical by two world wars, and knew how to observe propriety.

The relationship between the V and A’s keeper of textiles and this editor of mystery novels was only briefly alluded to at table, the conversation up until that point being the usual sort of questions always asked wherever two or more were gathered in the name of an informal British dinner party. Muriel said, “Oh, well, we were both dog girls, at a school full of fine young ladies. Then the Great War broke out and we were in ambulances in France together. Learned quite a few things over there. Not in the least how to speak what one usually dares not.” Muriel’s hand was resting on the table. Eddie, with a fond, if rather wry smile, patted the back of it, as if rewarding a favorite dog. “I think you were both at school together as well?”

“Yes, until by greatest good fortune we ran into each other at Dunkirk.” Ralph pleasantly and easily steered the conversation, taking out some of his favorite party pieces and presenting them to their hostesses with the same air as presenting the bottle of sherry. Laurie tuned out. He liked Ralph’s stories, as a rule, but he had heard these ones all before. It was at times like this where Laurie, who got along with nearly everyone he met, but was happier alone with his thoughts or with two or three close friends, recalled that Ralph liked this sort of thing. He took an almost chameleon-like pleasure in molding himself to social situations, and tended to be better pleased with himself when he was charming strangers than when he was alone.

“You tell a good story, Mr. Laynon,” said Eddie, when Ralph finished Laurie’s particular favorite, about the sharks in Mombassa. “Surprisingly good, as a matter of fact.”

“I used to write them down in diaries,” he said.

Eddie began looking like a hound catching on the scent. “Really? Do you still have them?”

Ralph hasn’t brought himself to burn them, thought Laurie, but he said, “Yes, he’s got rather a lot of them. Notes for novels.”

He meant this as a little private joke, but Eddie would have pricked up her ears and started baying, had she been a hound. “Really, what sorts?”

Laurie was surprised to discover that Ralph really  _ had _ been writing out notes for novels, instead of just using it as a convenient fiction. Eddie and Ralph became absorbed in discussions of plot and character, authors they both liked and so on. Laurie tried to take an interest in this-- after all, he had read French literature, surely he could interest himself in how contemporary, English literature was made-- but he and Muriel fell into shoptalk again. 

Muriel was being witty at the expense of their late director’s passive-aggressive war against the RAF airmen who had turned the cafe into the canteen during the war when Laurie heard “--think you can write me a good murder mystery then?  It seems to me more a matter of insertion of a couple of characters and points than extensive re-writing. Give it whatever ending you like. I never take the first endings. I always require them to be rewritten. Can you get me a new first chapter in, say, two weeks?”

Laurie looked, startled, at Muriel. Muriel looked slightly cagey. He tried to remember if he’d ever mentioned Ralph’s writing habits at work and then thought, ‘That’s an unworthy suspicion. Ralph’s stories have always been quite good.’

“I’m not promising anything, mind you,” said Eddie, which somewhat relieved Laurie’s anxieties. “Just to take a look. As it happens, I’m looking around for something to put out for next year, since Daphne Meadowes got so fed up with her detective she had the bomber he was on crash land in the Pacific, and then had him eaten by cannibals in Guiana. A bit more permanent than Reichenbach Falls, you’ll agree. Her fans will be extremely upset when it hits the shelves this July. I know we are- she was contracted for another book with us, and she'll exploit it to give us some more experimental stream-of-consciousness thing that won't sell instead of a mystery that will.” Eddie sniffed.

Ralph looked slightly bewildered, but resumed his party manner. “Anything to oblige a lady.”

“I’m hardly that,” said Eddie, tartly. “Just give me a good gristly murder, Mr. Lanyon, with three or four suspects, and a detective I can stretch over three books minimum.”

The typewriter in the second bedroom clacked unendingly for the next few weeks. Laurie retreated behind the gramophone and the paper, or forced himself to take the dog out on long walks. It rather worsened the pain in his knee, but that, at least, was useful. Ralph still couldn't quite accept comfort unless he was also giving it.  

Once, after reading too many articles in the newspapers about Burgess and Maclean’s now certain defection, but uncertain whereabouts, Laurie did venture to ask, “Things alright at work, Ralph?”

Ralph looked up from his dinner plate, with the hard, gay smile that always made Laurie feel faintly uneasy. “There’s a reason I thought two weeks was sufficient time to write the first chapter of a murder mystery, and plot out the rest.”

“Well, if you get tired of sublimating,” said Laurie, with a purposefully dazzling smile.

Ralph laughed, and the false look slid away. “You’ve always been disconcertingly uninhibited, Spud. Alright, let’s. If you don’t mind my sneaking back to the typewriter after. I’m nearly done.”

The next day, Eddie asked for the rest of it.

Laurie kept an eye on the papers. Days where Maclean stole focus Laurie could expect a little conversation, and Ralph’s company for an hour or so of the Third Programme. Days when Burgess did, Laurie resigned himself to long walks and a double dose of APC. 

He came back after one long walk with Childe Maurice to see Eddie there, spreading out typewritten pages, accented in red pencil, in the middle of saying, “--really, Mr. Lanyon, your female characters are atrocious. It would pass under any other editor, but I think you can do better. I hold my authors to a higher standard.” She looked up distractedly, “Mr. Odell, hello.”

“Er, hello. Can I get you anything?”

“A pencil sharpener,” she said, tartly, as Ralph lit another cigarette and shot Laurie a half-amused, half-exhausted look. “Since Mr. Lanyon cannot meet me during the work week, we’ll have to put in some evenings. Now look here, Mr. Lanyon, you may argue no properly brought up young woman would react like this, but let me tell you something about properly brought up young women penned up with other properly brought up young women in boarding schools--”

Laurie did not know whether or not to celebrate this, or mourn the loss of Ralph’s evenings and the quiet of the flat.  In the end, Laurie went out for champagne and for earplugs. It seemed a fitting expression of the confusion of feelings; Laurie never had learnt how to hold onto a strict purity of singular emotion where Ralph was concerned. 

 

***

 

“Eddie’s heard the hunting horn,” Muriel said, when they were at the bar the next day. Laurie set her glass of dry sherry before her, holding onto a pink gin for himself. “I hope poor Mr. Lanyon won’t take it to heart too much. She’s scented a manuscript she wants. She can be ruthless going after it.”

“Ralph’s happiest when he’s horribly busy,” said Laurie. 

“I'm glad Eddie listened to me.” She glanced around the bar. It was early yet, and the bartender was busy with the only other patrons, a small group of art students being rather dramatic over who was paying for what. “I had... wondered, with all the things in the paper about Guy Burgess, if Ralph was going to leave his job in a hurry. Not that I for a moment believe he could even sing “Jerusalem” without meaning every word, but because people in power can be so indiscriminate when it comes to things like this. I was very anxious he have an out. I didn't want him coming to any harm because of a mistake some other man had made.”

This had the effect of a depth charge on Laurie’s psyche.

“She didn't take him on out of pity, did she?” Laurie asked, rather distantly. He knew he had gone spectacularly white.

Muriel looked curiously at him. “Well, she partly did, but my interference in this business was kindly meant. You’d mentioned once or twice Ralph wrote for amusement, and I thought, ‘well, what the hell? He probably needs a new job and Eddie needs a new author.’ His first chapter was fine, but Eddie’s picky, and in the past turned down others of similar quality. I told her to ask for the rest before she made a choice.”

“If you give Ralph time enough, he's wonderful,” said Laurie, hardly knowing what he was saying. 

“Yes, when taking on a new author a publisher looks for what's going to make a good partnership. A rough start’s fine, as long as there's something of substance amidst the mess, which there certainly is for Ralph.”

“That's very true. He’ll swott away at it, too. He's very- change doesn't come easily to him, but he does his damndest when he cares. Which he does.” Then, confusedly, “About this, I mean.”

“Eddie does like his style. It's primarily for that she's keeping him on. She's of the opinion that every good author needs to get a lackluster book out of the way before hitting on something good. It isn't the start of the series that people remember, but it's continuance and its ending.”

“Yes,” said Laurie, starting to feel less dizzy, “yes, it isn't what you are but what you make of it.”

Again the same curious, measuring look, as if she were trying to date a particularly tricky tapestry without a provenance record. “You were ginger as a child, weren't you? The hair changes, but the complexion doesn't.” Then, in the brisk voice to which Laurie always responded, because it was so like Ralph’s, “Sit down. I know you don't like to show it when the knee’s bothering you, but it's clear you've banged it against the bar. I should have taken notice earlier. Drink your gin, duckie, get the pink back in your cheeks.”

He became aware that Muriel now knew probably more than she ever wished to about his domestic arrangements. 

But she was kind about it and said, when they had mostly finished their drinks, “D’you know how Eddie and I met? I was a rotten little twerp, horrible at games. Everyone called me ‘Specs.’ She rather took pity on me, and took me under her wing. I was her little shadow at school. And we’ve been friends... oh, nearly forty years, give or take. She’s had the good grace to entirely forget it. Sometimes I think that’s half of what a friendship is, remembering only the good bits, and finding a way to be pleasant about what annoys you in them. Love’s a choice, you know.”

“Is it?” said Laurie, still not entirely recovered. 

“I should think so, duckie,” said Muriel, with a smile. “It’s constantly and consciously choosing one person over any others you meet, and then making choices in common. You’ll be fine. You’re nice.”

“Too kind,” murmured Laurie. “As Florence Nightingale said to Edward the Seventh.”

“Out of period,” objected Muriel. “You want something someone said to Victoria, not Edward. I never much held with that Florence Nightingale guff. Nursing’s a lot more mess and swearing than people who invoke her name ever acknowledge.”

“What, we’ve a period, at the V and A?” asked Laurie, happy to find himself on familiar ground. “I thought all the other museums just dumped things out of scope of their own collections on us.” 

He was still rather shaken when he got home, and by dint of collapsing onto the couch and asking for one of Alec’s tablets, was coddled and then able to offer the demonstration of love guilt induced him to make. He almost felt the better for it, or did until Ralph passed him a cigarette saying, “Finish it for me, will you? And thanks.”

“What for?”

“Spud,” he said, with the look he’d used when Laurie had done something particularly stupid at school. “Don’t make me spell it out. Surely we don’t need to say we love each other, after ten years.”

Laurie gave back the cigarette and buried his head in Ralph’s chest. Ralph always dated it from the wedding night, though Laurie felt this was not quite accurate. It didn’t matter how it started, it didn’t matter, the letter from Ralph that had already been burned-- the letter that Ralph still did not know Laurie had read-- didn’t matter. He’d so many letters from Ralph now, none of which included--

But that was gone now. Laurie mentally archived it and packed it neatly away. 

“Eleven this fall,” said Ralph, with a sort of innocent pride. “I never thought this existed, ‘til you. It’s made all the difference.”

“Has it?”

“How cynical Spud becomes in his old age. Yes, my dear. If you’re still worrying, it’s made the difference between being tasked with tracking down Burgess’s associates, and being on the list myself.” He stubbed out the cigarette. “I don’t like it. There’s too many names I know, and not a one of them’s a Communist sympathizer. Why the devil can’t they just leave us alone?”

Laurie closed his eyes. He had thought, while younger, that the world would become clearer and more comprehensible with age, not the opposite. “If any of them recognize you....”

“I don’t do that kind of fieldwork. But even so, I don’t like where this work is taking me. Let’s hope Eddie likes the finished novel, eh?” 

She did. Mostly, Ralph said, with the sort of self-deprecating good humor that meant he was pleased with himself but didn't like to show it, because she could bully him into all the rewrites she wanted. 

“Well,” said Ralph, tossing the publisher’s letter on the table, with a mix of exaltation and despair. “There’s an excuse at least. I've an out from the frying pan and onto the countertop instead of the gas ring.”

“Ralph, you're going to be a published author,” Laurie protested. “Let's have a party.”

“You hate parties.”

Laurie didn't bother denying it, so, in the end, Alec ended up organizing a long weekend away at Biffy’s country place, with Algie Hawkes and his boyfriend, whom Alec knew from work, as the other staying guests. There were plenty more guests that pitched up Friday evening, looking for drinks, and more illicit pleasures, but Laurie thought he bore it with tolerable good grace. At the very least, Ralph had laughed and kissed him in a corner when Laurie had gotten about to the limits of his patience. 

“This part’s more for Alec than myself,” said Ralph, looking charming with a lock of his fair hair falling out of its usual polished order. Laurie knew this was not entirely true. Ralph still made a production of disliking queer parties, but that was more for Laurie’s benefit than actual distaste.  “One must oblige one’s host. And Biffy’s borrowed a sailboat from somewhere for tomorrow. You'll like that, Spuddy. I haven't taken you sailing in an age, have I?”

“Not since last autumn," said Laurie, absently. Alec was just then in rather close conversation with Algie’s boy friend. It could be work, thought Laurie. Alec was a neurosurgeon and probably had a lot of overlap cases with psychoanalysts. He rather hoped it was. Selfishly, Laurie did not want to commit to drinks with Algie after work for the next few weeks, doing the hard work of consoling him over a breakup. Laurie was not terrifically good at comforting anyone but Ralph, and even then Laurie was only good at it because Ralph was only comforted by marked demonstrations of need.

“Alec’s found a new friend,” said Ralph, following the line of Laurie’s perturbed gaze. “Early in the evening for him. Oh, is that David?” Then, at Laurie’s doubtful look, added, “Algie’s boy friend.”

“Yes, I think so. Is Biffy anywhere about?”

“Probably jumping from the roof into the pool or something.” At Laurie’s aghast look he said, “No, RAF daredevil stuff, like the car racing he was into before the war. He's not Sandy.”

“Whatever did happen to Sandy?” Laurie asked, realizing he didn't know.

“Joined the Red Cross. Odd sort, Sandy. Entirely unfit for the little dramas of ordinary life, but Alec always claimed he wore well in a crisis.”

“I would never have guessed,” said Laurie, though he was already losing interest. Ralph was at the very rare stage of satisfaction with drink, company, and himself that led him to buss affectionately against Laurie, like a stray cat at last admitting it wanted to come in off the street and be petted. 

“There's a lot about Alec’s taste in men that’s fairly inexplicable. Sandy least of all.”

Laurie had given up speculating on what Alec was attracted to in a partner. At one point Laurie would have said “blonds of his class,”  which somewhat survived the Russian emigre ballet dancer, but did not survive the lorry driver, the Indian chef, the Trinidadian waiter, the Jamaican BBC Third Programme technician, and then Biffy, whose mother was Chinese, but whose paternal uncle had been knighted for his work in the Foreign Service, and whose county place was a four bedroom manor outside of Dover. Biffy was a great deal less psychologically damaged than all the others, which scuppered Ralph’s theory, until they all realized at breakfast the next morning that Biffy still took as much benzedrine now as he had during the Battle for Britain. Algie’s boy friend, who turned out to be named David Jung and unsportingly refused to either offer a nickname or be given one, observed it and spoke rather infuriatingly about the benefits of psychoanalysis over chemical supplements. 

It was probably this which caused Biffy to accidentally-on-purpose bring only ham or prawn sandwiches, six apples, and beer onto the sailboat. The apples were somewhat inexplicable until Ralph cracked, “Keeping the doctor away, eh?” The sandwiches meant Alec drank his lunch too, which Laurie at first thought a casualty of friendly fire. But, as it turned out, Biffy was equally annoyed with Alec and only liked to say so through food. As Ralph later speculated, Biffy was inured to a certain level of infidelity, and was even capable of being very pleasant to Alec’s other lovers, but he'd be damned before letting Alec use one of them lecture him on his benzedrine usage.

It was all rather hard on David, Laurie supposed, who after all was only trying to help in the manner in which he had been in trained. But Laurie was still pettily amused when David abruptly stopped in the middle of an out of tune, “(There’ll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover,” and had to nap below deck, drunk and seasick, for the rest of the afternoon. This left Algie at loose ends, and he spent the afternoon absently snapping pictures.

“You rather miss the sea, still, don't you, Ralph?” Alec asked, slurring his words a bit.

“She's a hard mistress to throw over,” said Ralph. “No intended infidelity, Spud.”

“Go on, I know your true love will always be the sea,” said Laurie, affectionately. “Is it warm enough for a swim, d’you think, Biffy?”

“Race you to that rock, Spud,” said Biffy, eagerly pulling off his shirt and diving in.

“Go on, I'll follow you two,” said Ralph, already doing something with the ropes and jibs, or whatever they were. Laurie could no longer dive, but he loved to swim still. The pull on the cobbled-together muscles of his leg was not even half as bad as when he was walking. He surfaced just in time to see Algie snapping the photo of Ralph Laurie had always secretly wished to possess: Ralph, in a white shirt rolled to the elbows and open at the throat, cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, squinting slightly against the glare of the sun on the sea, the sea breeze blowing his fair hair into disorder, his left hand tucked in his pocket, his right extended upwards, holding onto a rope, and a full spread of sail behind him.

Laurie got the photo framed when Algie gave a copy to him later, and was terrifically amused when Eddie saw it on the hall table and said, immediately, “That's it! Mr. Odell, get me the negative of this at once.”

It remained Ralph’s author picture for some years thereafter, to Laurie’s continued amusement, and Ralph’s increasing exasperation.

 

***

 

Laurie had not entirely realized how long it took to produce a novel. It wasn't until next year that Ralph had proofs to correct instead of pages to type, and even then he had to take a couple of days off actual work to deal with things Laurie had never thought about, like talking to the press, or page layout. The book cover, at least, was simple, because the publisher only ever put out books with yellow dust jackets with the name of book and author in bold type.

“What do they think about this at work?” Laurie asked, curiously.

“It amuses the skipper,” said Ralph. “As long as I'm not writing murder mysteries about state secrets they don't much mind.” Then, after a moment, he said, “He knows why I didn't go to Cambridge, Spud. He's been dropping hints about pensions and second careers for months now.”

“Oh,” said Laurie, not sure what else to say. He was glad to have his back to Ralph, as he filled the tub. Childe Maurice had found a dead thing to roll in on their walk, and Ralph was not best pleased to have the flat smelling of Eau de Roadkill.

“Not a bad sort,” said Ralph, wrestling the whining dog into the bathroom. “Doesn't mind, and knows I'm hardly likely to be subject to blackmail. Attends your Sunday concerts when they're on, and is quite aware of how boringly domestic I am. He means it as a friendly warning. Things are only going to get worse as we learn more about Burgess.” Ralph dumped the dog into the tub, despite Childe Maurice’s howls of protest.

Laurie, perched on the commode, began attacking Childe Maurice’s coat with soap and washcloth.”D’you think you could like it, Ralph? Being a full time novelist?”

“Well,” he said, hooking his fingers into the dog’s collar to hold him still. “We’ll see how this one does. I hope you'll like it at least.”

Laurie somewhat mendaciously said he was sure he could, but was very relieved to discover, when it came out that July, that it was not in the least a bad novel. On a cruise ship in the West Indies, a raging bitch of a dowager had been found murdered in her state room, and it was up to the First Mate to solve the case. 

The detective was exactly the sort of hero one could have expected of Ralph: cynical from disappointed romanticism, with a managing disposition, and a tendency to take on insurmountable problems with the bleak courage of the self-disciplined neurotic. Ralph had, as a private joke with Laurie, made the hero Irish. “Not quite as hard to get over as being queer,” Ralph had said, lighting a satisfied cigarette. “Cf. Oscar Wilde.” First Mate Patrick “Finn” Finnegan had a public school education, but family in trade, and had gone into the Merchant Marine as expected, instead of to university, as he had wanted.

The Watson character was Christopher Wyndham, an auburn-haired Oxbridger who, as a passenger, could collect evidence the hero could not. At the end of the novel, with the mystery solved and Britain at war, he decided to join up with the RNVR alongside First Mate Finn. Laurie was not entirely sure if Wyndham was inspired by him, or by the dead sub, whose name Ralph had never spoken aloud. If it was the sub, Laurie felt slightly embarrassed to realize Ralph had a type, and that type was nicely mannered but occasionally quite bitchy hazel-eyed public schoolboys. What this said about one Odell, L.P. Laurie did not like to deeply consider.

He was, however, quite proud to be carrying around the book with its bright yellow dust jacket, with the bold ‘R.R. LANYON’ under the title. His mother even asked Ralph to sign hers on their usual Friday dinner. Laurie was never sure if she actually did read it, but she pretended she had, and so did most of the rest of the village. The village had never had someone even mildly famous to claim before, even a first-time mystery novelist who only came down on weekends to go rabbiting with his Airedale.

The second book did better than the first. This was again a shipboard mystery, but had the added benefit of German U-boats lurking under the water of the passenger ship headed back to England. Ralph also began experimenting with what chiefly interested him as a writer: espionage. Someone used to coded talk in both public and personal life could not entirely get away from it in so personal a thing as his writing, and the ellipses that seemed vague in the first book were fascinating in the new context of the second.

It was Ralph’s third book that really took off. (Possibly, said Eddie, because aside from a couple of competent and entertainingly sarcastic Wrens at the beginning and end, Ralph hadn't tried his hand at female characters.) The public loved the idea of a locked room mystery set on an armed trawler in the North Seas in early 1940. That book had the added benefit of being less about murder and more about Fifth Columnists. Had Lieutenant-Commander Finnegan really picked up a downed RAF pilot and a couple of Norwegian fishermen? Or were they all Nazi agents, interested in British asdic equipment and tactics? Or was just one of them? The answer had hinged on something Laurie found very stereotypically Ralph: the supposed RAF pilot had the wrong accent. 

The success came just in time. 1953, the Home Secretary decided, was the time to combat vice. Laurie kept very quiet about his home life at work, and mentioned only vaguely that his best friend was, indeed the mystery novelist R.R.Lanyon. Ralph quietly, and with regret and relief mingled, exited MI5.

“As far as I could tell,” said Ralph, as he poured himself a double whiskey later that evening, “Everyone just thinks I left in order to write full time. They were all good enough to pretend they read my novels.”

Laurie did something he hadn't in ages, because of how difficult it was to get back up again, and sat on the rug by Ralph’s feet, once Ralph had settled into his usual chair. Childe Maurice came pantingly over and rested his head in Laurie’s lap. 

“What's this weekend, Spuddy? The Third Programme said the roses are at their peak right now.”

“Tomorrow we could probably go down for the day. We were invited ‘round Alec’s, but I half expect he asked us because he knew we’d refuse. Sunday’s Mozart’s oboe quartet in F major. I'll need to be back by three or so. I don't think Miss Frost knows which eighteenth century oboe to pull out of the vault. I'd rather supervise.”

“I suppose Mr. Straike will expect us at service again.”

“He always does.”

“What a life of horrendous vice this is,” said Ralph, with dark amusement. “I don't wonder they need to lock us up, or make us drink hemlock for corrupting the youth of London, what with our talk of rose cultivation, avoiding parties, and Sunday service. We’re a danger to society.”

“Horrible,” agreed Laurie, leaning into the hand Ralph had absently placed on the top of his head. “I'm inflicting historically informed performance practices on London, as supported by the V and A. I should be hung, drawn, and quartered, if not shot at dawn.”

“Corrupting the young indeed,” agreed Ralph.

Sunday afternoon found Laurie limping around the South Court, trying to keep the anxious Miss Frost from getting in the way of his walking stick. “Oh no, Miss Frost, I have to remember where  _ I  _ saw it last, which was when it was last on display in 1949. Go and see if they’ve set up the music stands, will you? And get our oboist a glass of something from the cafe before he gets himself further worked up about using the wrong oboe. Thank you, Miss Frost.”

There were a couple of museum goers clustered around the current exhibition. Laurie hummed the opening movement of the oboe quartet to himself. He paused halfway down the South Court, recalled, ‘Oh yes, they couldn't fit it back in its usual place without having to dissemble it entirely, and put it on the shelf opposite,’ and turned to go down underground, to the various vaults.

“Laurie Odell?” came a voice Laurie hadn't heard in thirteen years.

It seemed so absurd Laurie dismissed the thought at once. He turned, smilingly, saying, “Yes, how can I help--” but couldn't finish the question.

It was Andrew. In a suit no less. Laurie had never seen him in anything but flannels and corduroys. He almost didn’t recognize him. The things Laurie had guessed at and longed for in the EMS hospital seemed now written all over him; the steady gray eyes now had wrinkles at the corners; the fair hair, like old gilt, had faded to a brown that here and there offered a strand of gold in the light.

“I thought I recognized your step,” said Andrew, with a bright, uncomplicated smile. “I certainly recognized your humming.”

“Andrew,” said Laurie, stupidly.

“Yes, hello.” The smile turned somehow shy, and Laurie could see at once, in the face of the man before him Andrew at eighteen, washing the floor of the EMS hospital lavatory. “I thought you might come to a concert of Mozart’s oboe quartet in F major. Hoped more than thought, really.”

“I-- well, more than that,” said Laurie, more confused than he had been in years. “I’m organizing it. I work here.”

“Do you?” Andrew considered this a moment and then concluded, “I'm not surprised. This sort of thing suits you. And I know we were all grateful the V and A remained open during the Blitz. It was nice, having a place to go where one could... think. Of things other than the war.”

“Did you ever get the book I left you?” Laurie asked. In the end, he had not written, except to Dave, and it had seemed unmannerly to ask if Dave had ever given the book to Andrew.

“I did. I used to read it in snatches when we went over to North Africa.”

“Oh,” said Laurie, recalling it. “Yes, I remember. You did ambulance work, the rest of the war- I... look, there’s a rather nice cafe here. Would you mind waiting for me? I've got to go and retrieve an oboe. We can catch up then.”

He also took a moment to pop round his office and phone home.

“I'll bring more APC,” said Ralph, as soon as he recognized Laurie’s voice and heard the strain in it. “Or something stronger?”

“If I have something stronger I won't be mentally sharp enough to put out fires,” Laurie said. He closed his eyes. “Ralph.”

“Yes, Spud?”

“You know I--”

“Have a care, Spud!”

“Yes.”

“No need to say it.”

“Well, there rather is.”

The other end of the line was silent. “Spud, they haven't found anything--”

“No! No, nothing like that. It's only- it's only Andrew Raynes wandered into the museum just now and recognized my step.”

“Ah.” It was impossible to read his mood from so short a syllable. Then, after a moment, Ralph said, “You know I won't be difficult about anything you want.”

“Well I want boring convention,” said Laurie, on edge. “I want to argue over whose turn it is to do the dishes.”

“Do you really?”

“You know what I mean.”

After a moment Ralph said, “You need another dose--”

“I know, I know, my knee is telling me it's time for one.” Laurie cradled the receiver between ear and shoulder and used both hands to flex his knee. “I'm sorry Ralph, I don't mean to take it out on you.”

“I know.”

“I just wanted you to know-- we’re just going to talk. That’s all. I made a choice a while ago and I'll keep making that choice.” Then fearing Ralph would be thinking of the not-very-effective break when Laurie had first chosen Andrew, and the week of physical counterargument Ralph provided, Laurie said, “I always did prefer to bet on the dark horse. I just couldn't admit it to myself. Look Ralph, you will be here for the concert, won't you?”

“Unless you'd rather I stay home.”

“No, I want you.” Then, belatedly: “Here.”

In a more relaxed tone, Ralph said, “Oh, well. If you  _ want  _ me, Spud.”

“I do.”

“Then stop worrying.”

“ _ Can  _ you bring a new bottle of APC?” Laurie asked, grudgingly. “I've only got two tablets left in my desk and I’ll need to take them as soon as I hang up.”

Ralph laughed. “I'll take care of it. God bless, Spud.”

“God bless.”

 

***

 

The APC had reduced the pain in his knee to its usual dull burn by the time Laurie got everyone settled, told Miss Frost he believed she could come up to bat but could find him in the cafe if she needed a pinch hitter, and found Andrew again. He was sitting with a pot of tea.

“Hello Laurie,” he said, politely rising.

“Oh, do sit,” said Laurie, easing himself into his own chair. He felt absurdly self-conscious, well aware that he was no longer twenty-three and slender as an undergraduate. “I... Andrew. I'm not sure where to begin. Tell me what you've been doing with yourself, won’t you?”

Andrew looked hesitant, as if he would have prefered to talk of something else, but was too polite to insist. He had spent the remainder of the war with the Friends Ambulance Service, first in North Africa, then on into Italy, at which point he transferred units and started working with refugee camps. He made brief mention of having gone to Oxford, before resuming that sort of work through the Red Cross. Laurie felt almost embarrassed to have remained in England, and was glad to at least have the bombing of the V and A to point to, as part of his non-combatant service during the war. 

“I was very glad of your book in North Africa, by the by,” Andrew ventured, after Laurie somewhat clumsily explained his duties at the V and A. “It was... it was like you described it in the apple orchard. Do you remember? Long stretches of boredom followed by the most awful confusion. And I remembered sometimes why you’d look as if you were holding things back. I do... I understand, I really do, but I wish... I wish you had told me. I knew, after I punched that man.” 

Laurie, ashamed of his cowardice, forced himself to look up from his tea cup. “You know-- it wasn’t-- you didn’t actually meet Ralph.”

“No, I know,” said Andrew. “Sandy told me.”

“He did?” asked Laurie, entirely bewildered. “How do you know-- wait, you do mean Alexander Reid, don’t you?”

“Yes, a Red Cross doctor,” Andrew said, nodding, as if Laurie had offered the right answer in a tutorial. “He said he knew you in Bridstow.”

“I had forgotten he’d gone into the Red Cross,” said Laurie, as this was the least damning of the truths springing to his lips. 

“Yes. He was-- he was the first person willing to talk to me about....” Andrew hesitated and said, “about the book. The one you gave me.”

“Oh?”

“Dave... well he gave me the book, but told me to take care not to give into a....” Coded language did not come easily to Andrew; he was too used to thinking silently and clearly and then saying exactly what he meant. “A glorified paganism.”

“He did tell me as much, when I saw him.”

“It took me quite some time to forgive him, you know,” said Andrew, in another unexpected confidence. Laurie wondered why he should feel surprise any longer; this conversation was not going any way he had imagined it over the years. “I was furiously angry with him for keeping me from seeing you. It wasn’t right-- it wasn’t  _ his  _ right to choose for me. But I was angry at Dave, and I didn’t have the address of your college, and Sandy, you know, is very kind. If he ever sees someone looking lost, he goes up and helps them.”

That was one way of putting it, thought Laurie. 

“And he saw me reading the book, and when I passed it over to him, he saw the inscription and said that he knew you, and-- and knew  _ of  _ me, and explained a few things and told me if I ever had any questions, I should come to him, because he knew...” Andrew frowned, as if trying to get the words exact. “He knew what it was to have a lot of questions about yourself, and no one to help you answer them. It was... I suppose I don’t need to be telling you what a relief it was, to finally have someone to talk to about your-- about the book, I mean.” 

“I had to do most of my thinking about it on my own,” said Laurie, carefully. “Later on, I often wished I hadn’t. I’m glad you didn’t. And I’m sorry for not being that person for you.”

“You clarified a lot of things,” said Andrew, almost indignant. “And I do understand why you didn’t say anything.” He lowered his voice, so that Laurie had to lean in a little to hear him. “Coming back here and seeing what the Home Secretary has to say is proof enough of that. But it’s not something in myself that I can hide or eradicate, or just... be ignorant of.” At Laurie’s expression, Andrew said, “You did think I could stay ignorant, didn’t you?”

“Hoped you could, rather,” said Laurie. 

Andrew saw Laurie’s discomfort and shifted tracks, slightly. “I know I never met Ralph, by the way. I should have guessed. Someone who passed on  _ The Phaedrus  _ to someone of his... disposition, I suppose, to help him. That sort of a person couldn’t have said the things that... what’s his name. That Bunny said. He couldn’t be the sort of person to seek me out unkindly.”

“No, he couldn’t.” Laurie busied himself fixing a second cup of tea. 

“Are you... do you still see much of him?”

“Yes. He’s coming to the concert this evening, if you would actually care to meet him.” Laurie thought this would be more painful to say, but he was more conscious of his own relief in having spoken. 

Andrew’s brow creased a little, as if he was not sure what to do with this answer.

“You needn’t, if you think you would dislike it,” Laurie began to say.

“No, no,” said Andrew. “I think I should like to meet him, if he won’t--”

“He’s... he’s quite out of the navy and His-- sorry, Her Majesty’s service. He writes mystery novels now. The last one that came out,  _ The Wine Dark Sea,  _ is held to be rather good..” But Andrew was no longer a conscientious objector; he was a relief worker with the Red Cross. Laurie hastily readjusted his thinking. “I, er. I should tell you, we’ve been, er... we....”

“Sandy told me.”

“Oh yes, he would.” Laurie didn’t know how to express what he meant. “Things... things haven’t very much changed. I don’t know what he last heard.”

“That the two of you were sharing digs.” It was said evenly, almost emotionlessly. 

“Things haven’t changed.” 

After a moment, Andrew offered a smile that had a sort of professional kindness to it. Any moment Laurie expected to be offered a blanket and a mug of tea, and instructions on which tent to go to. “ Are you happy?”

“Most days. One’s never happy all the time, unless one’s living a very chemical life.” Laurie said, “My dear--”

“I am glad, you know,” said Andrew. “I only ever hoped--” He changed his mind about what he was going to say. “I only ever hoped for good things for you, Laurie. I hope you knew that, even though we didn’t have a chance to talk. I ought to have written again, but I....”

“Did Sandy--”

“He advised me not to, or if I did, to be very careful about what to write. He said never to put these sorts of things in writing, if I could avoid it.” He looked suddenly weary. “At twenty, one is not always apt to take full responsibility for all one’s actions. It’s very easy to listen to people who seem to know better, and not your inner light. But I’m abdicating responsibility, phrasing it like that. Sandy also told me to look you up when I got back to England, and offered to find out your address. But I only listened to part of his advice, because at that point, I was tired of hurting and of being brave, and couldn’t stand to see in your hand everything that Sandy had already told me.” 

Andrew had always valued maturity, Laurie recalled, studying the bent head, with its darkened hair. After a moment Andrew stopped fussing with the scone on his plate and said, “Cowardice, really. It was only that I’d reached the moment of choice when we first saw some of the camps. Ater that, Sandy was kinder to me than I deserved, really.”

Laurie was very surprised by that. “Do you still see much of each other?”

Andrew made a noise more exhale than laugh. “He was only being kind to me, because there was no one else like us in the unit, and it was-- I’m still haunted by some of the things I saw in the camps. I was badly in need of kindness. I think he was too. You really need it, when you see for yourself how horribly unkind people can be to each other.”

“My dear,” said Laurie, helplessly. “There aren’t words.”

After a moment, Andrew said, “I only wish I’d been-- that the choice hadn’t been taken from me, back in 1940. Before everything else happened.”

“My dear,” said Laurie, low and helpless. 

“I’m not-- I know I shouldn’t ask--”

Laurie wished he had something to fuss with, too, but he’d turned down the offer of food, feeling rather flabby and paunchy. He glanced around, and, judging the other tables too far to hear him, said,  “I went AWOL, I wanted so desperately to speak with you. But Dave... well, I thought, in the end, that I had hurt you enough, and ought to go.”

“ _ You  _ never hurt me,” Andrew said, emphatically, but softly.

“I would have made a different choice, if I’d been able to speak with you,” Laurie admitted. It was a painful thing to say aloud.  

“If I’d only woken up earlier, or if I’d tried to speak to Dave earlier, or come to see you before leaving for London, everything would have been different,” said Andrew, idly crumbling his scone to bits. “I used to torment myself about it. But perhaps then I wouldn’t have kept on with the Friends Ambulance Service, or seen the camps in Germany, or joined the Red Cross. It’s useless to speculate on the past, really. It can’t be changed. You can only change how you understand it, and what you do with it. But, you know, I don’t think I was made this way without any hope of happiness. I just haven’t... found everything I’m looking for. Yet.”

Laurie wanted very desperately to reach across the table, and take Andrew’s hand, but he was painfully aware that he was at work, and Miss Frost was sure to come fluttering anxiously in, with the news that the conductor had lost his baton, or that there were only six hundred and ninety-nine seated places instead of the usual seven hundred, or that a block of resin had gone missing. “Andrew, I wish there was something--”

Andrew looked up again with that kindly professional smile. “Don’t, Laurie.”

They both fell silent. 

Laurie wanted badly to say, ‘I loved you. In loving you, I first knew myself. Aside from Ralph, you are the only person I ever loved like this.’ He tried to look it. Andrew caught some of it, and said, quietly. “I am still grateful for the time we did have each other. Having a... having a friendship the way we did. It’s something that always changes you. For the better, I think. I’m not sorry.”

“Nor am I,” Laurie said, softly. 

They had begun to speak, in a disconnected, almost stilted way about how Laurie came to be in charge of the classical music concerts, when Miss Frost came fluttering in.

“I’m afraid duty calls,” Laurie said, reaching for the cane leaning against the side of the table. “But I hope you will stay for the concert. I should like to introduce you to Ralph, if you’re still willing.” 

It was impossible to tell how willing Ralph was, as Ralph already had on his best professional manner when Miss Frost brought him to Laurie’s office. But he tossed one-handed the bottle of APC when he spotted Laurie, with an idle, “Owzat!” as if they’d been on the cricket field. Laurie, who had his bad leg elevated, with his foot on the edge of his desk, fumbled the catch a little.

“Cricket never was your game, was it Spud?” Ralph asked.

“No,” said Laurie, struggling with the cap. “Thanks, Ralph. I needed these. You know, technically you don’t have clearance to be here.”

“Not have clearance?” Ralph balanced on the edge of Laurie’s deck, left hand tucked into his pocket. “I suppose I ought to get used to that.” 

Laurie shook two pills out into his palm and turned to Miss Frost with a smile. “It’s alright, Miss Frost. I know it’s entirely Mr. Lanyon’s fault. Thank you for bringing him.”

Miss Frost hesitated in the doorway and then said, all in a rush, “Mr, Lanyon, I just wanted to say I  _ so  _ loved  _ The Wine Dark Sea.  _ Finn’s my favorite detective-- more than Lord Peter Wimsey, even.”

“Thank you,” said Ralph, gratified.

“Do you know what’s next?”

“Oh, Dunkirk, I think. It’s a logical next step.”

“It won't be too painful to revisit?” asked Laurie. 

Ralph shot a fond look at Laurie. “Not at all. I think it's time there was some book that talked of Dunkirk as more than just a bloody mess.”

“Some good came out of it,” said Laurie, then, fearing to have been caught out, said, “Did you know, Miss Frost, that I owe Mr. Lanyon here for a Channel crossing? I was on his trawler after Dunkirk, though I didn’t know it at the time. It was great good luck; we hadn’t seen each other in seven years at that point. A knee for a damn good friend. I don’t mind the exchange.”

“You popping APC or something stronger, Spud?” asked Ralph. 

Miss Frost gave a somewhat startled smile. She was not a young woman equipped to deal with anything out of the ordinary. 

Laurie took pity on her. “I’ll be out to talk to the conductor in a moment-- the knee’s acting up a bit and it’s got me in an odd mood. Shut the door, will you? Thanks.” 

“Can I smoke in here?” Ralph asked, taking a packet out of his trouser pocket. 

“Better not, I’ve got to go out in a minute.” Laurie weighed the bottle in one hand, and, deciding to give the APC some time to work, opened the drawer of his desk, to put it away. “Is Miss Frost gone? I can’t hear her heels any longer.”

“Sounds like it.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Door’s locked, at least.” 

Laurie grabbed Ralph by the tie and pulled him down for a kiss. 

“Spuddy!”

Laurie affected a look of innocence. Ralph’s tone had been one of more startled surprise than displeasure. “I said I was in an odd mood. And I hadn’t done this since yesterday. Look, I’d like to introduce Andrew to you, but I wanted to--”

“I know, Spud.”

“Still. Doesn’t hurt to reinforce it. I want you to know what I’ll always do when faced with a choice. I’ll go with you.”

“Oh Spuddy,” said Ralph, and his ruined hand rested lightly above Laurie’s ruined knee. They were, for a moment, in perfect balance. 


End file.
